You don’t get defrauded, unless you willingly give someone your money. This is not a valid criticism of cryptocurrency.

I’m not sure that’s always even true, but it’s a lot easier to get defrauded when everyone you’re transacting with is online people with a series of randomesque “hashes” tying them to a wallet…and more importantly…the fraud is often irreversible. I’ve had people steal my credit card multiple times and not paid a dime when it happened.

Good, but PayPal has locked me out of my account multiple times. So I prefer to use cryptocurrency where that can’t happen.

I haven’t had this experience as a user…so I guess for doing whatever likely weird things you’re doing Monero is best. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

That doesn’t mean it’s good for most, or even many people though.

You go on (for example) https://localmonero.co and you buy it with your preferred payment method.

I’m guessing they too use a payment gateway (often PayPal), and I have no idea who these people are and have no guarantee that they aren’t going to defraud me or that they will keep my information private.

A distributed ledger is not a scam.

Nah, the whole ecosystem is though. There was an era where cryptocurrency felt somewhat less scammy, but it was also worth less (or worthless) during that time. A distributed ledger is just not that useful of a technology. Especially one that works the way blockchain works, that’s why it’s being used almost 100% for fake-o “currencies”, NFTs, and ponzis.

Yes, but cash can’t be used for online payments. Monero is the most private way to pay online.

Again, I don’t have a need for this and like I’ve also said several times most people also do not. Hell, most people make online payments peer-to-peer using venmo with their transactional history set to fucking public. Just because you sit in some weirdo niche category doesn’t mean that this is an overall useful thing for many or most.

EDIT: And actually now that I think of it, you could just buy a prepaid credit card using cash and buy shit online using that.